I have an XBMCBuntu installation (based on Ubuntu 11.10), meaning that I don't have a graphical desktop environment installed.
I've connected a set of USB speakers, and for about a minute or two, running
pacmd list-sinks yields only one sink: my laptop's onboard sound card.
After about 3 minutes, running the same command yields both the original sound card and the USB speakers, at which point I can run
pacmd set-default-sink alsa_output.usb-1130_USB_AUDIO-00-AUDIO.analog-stereo and play sound out of the peripheral speakers.
Unfortunately, the changes brought forth by the
pacmd set-default-sink command aren't persistent across reboots. I suspect that this is because pulseaudio falls back on the onboard sound card when it can't detect the USB speakers for those first three minutes. Of course, I'm not really sure that this is the case, but it begs the following questions:
- Why does it take so long to detect the speakers; Is there anything I can do to speed things up?
- Is there a way of making these changes persistent other than scheduling a cronjob to run
pacmd set-default-sink alsa_output.usb-1130_USB_AUDIO-00-AUDIO.analog-stereoafter a few minutes of uptime?